Why everyone wants to dance with Léo Walk
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Léo Walk was not always Léo Walk. Once upon a time, he was a teenager called Léo Handtschoewercker, growing up in the Parisian banlieue of Champigny-sur-Marne. “It was really tough,” says the dancer-choreographer, now 29. “One day, I decided I have to carve out my own path – and I have to follow it hard.” Handtschoewercker had been breakdancing since the age of eight, part of a generation enjoying the huge hip-hop boom in France in the 2000s. He decided to double down on this under a new name, Léo Walk.
“I chose to advance, to fight,” he explains in the upstairs bedroom of a Parisian villa where he and his company, La Marche Bleue, have just completed a shoot for HTSI. For hours, they have whirled, writhed and often just larked about, under his gentle but firm direction. “‘Walk’ was like a mantra. People now say ‘Léo Walk’, and so I’m condemned now to keep moving. To walk, walk…”
Many years later, Walk – as everyone now knows him – has toured with singers Christine and the Queens and Angèle, staged shows for Jacquemus and Agnès B and starred in a campaign for Louis Vuitton; he has toured nationally with La Marche Bleue; he has a clothing line, Walk in Paris; he even has his own genre, “La Walkance”, summing up his unique style of break, contemporary and what he calls “artier” touches. You can see it on YouTube: in one piece, Isola, he dances to a lament by the Argentine singer Mercedes Sosa, alternately falling to and rising from the ground, a permanent ripple; in another, Parce Que, he moves delicately to the song of the same name by Serge Gainsbourg. This mix of modern movement with old-school chanson is his USP – something he stumbled across as he danced to his father’s records as a child.
“Most guys who breakdance,” he says, feed off “la haine” – which literally means hatred, but here more broadly means a rage, a buzz. “I felt a certain haine in chanson française. I had something to really let loose there.” It also provided a balm. “I felt bad in the ghetto – everyone having to fight, to sell weed – but I didn’t feel great among the bourgeois types either. So I danced to link the two.”
Walk is a slight but certain presence, focused and self-possessed. Lying face-up on the bed, as on a therapist’s couch, he eventually gets up and starts moving around the room as he acts out parts of his past. With his dark handsome looks (the result of a Flemish father with Asian roots and a Portuguese mother) and light sprinkling of tattoos, he could be a suitable face for modern multiculturalism. Yet his work is not overtly political. His latest, Maison d’en face, is a sensual piece set in a house, the dancers forever coming back together, however often they might split. “I needed some warmth,” says Walk of its creation. “With everything going on in the world, I can’t be political. Everyone is reposting everything – I still can’t process what’s going on. I’m touched by it, but I can’t process it.”
When Walk was a child, taking part in dance competitions with his crew Battle J, he never thought it might lead to a career. “It really was a very underground culture back then,” he says. “And people were really snobby about it. Honestly! Today, all of fashion is like: ‘Oh, we love the ghetto’ – but at the time, no doors were open for us.” He could, however, see a “slight opening” for what he could offer: “If doors open, it’s because some artists break the rules.” Walk’s breaking of the rules could seem quite conventional. “I’m a man, I’m straight, but I’m very sensitive. I used to wear Dr Martens and listen to Yann Tiersen…” He chuckles. “I know it seems crazy to say that now. But at the time, growing up where we grew up, frankly, you didn’t go home and listen to beautiful music...”
His training was hardly academic either. “I did classes – I can’t really say if it was ‘proper’ training. To give you an idea, my first audition I ever did, my teacher turned up with a massive spliff and a 12-pack of beer…” (He gets up and mimes the tutor, joint in hand.) That said, he took his training very seriously. “To be a really great dancer, you need to have danced eight hours a day for at least 10 years. Otherwise, it’s not possible.” Sometimes, what his dancers do could look easy, “but it only seems like that because you don’t see the technique any more”.
There are 10 people in La Marche Bleue, aged from 24 to 37. “We are all close in age with Léo, so it has this feeling of a group of friends working together,” says one of the dancers, Miranda Chan. “Our individuality is extremely important. In a dance company, it’s often about the ensemble, synchronicity and unity. Here, we have both moments of being in a collective and being individuals.”
“There are two special things about the company,” adds another member, Abu Niang. “First, the freedom we have to be ourselves. It’s always nice to show who you are onstage. And second, the connecting of dancers from totally different worlds. We come together, from all sorts of backgrounds, to create something. I find that really beautiful.”
Walk says he never meant to have his own company, but it came about naturally. Belying the old choreographer stereotype, Walk says you can lead without being too strict. “I suffered from that – I had professors who were hard; my dad was hard too. I think you can take the lead via your ideas and your work, but you don’t have to be strict or severe. If you do it with love, you can create good stuff.”
As for the wider dance world, he sees it changing. “I feel like in the next generation, or maybe two, they’ll be doing contemporary hip-hop at the Opéra national de Paris, and it will be at an insane level. It’ll be crazy.” It is hard, though, to imagine him waiting generations to get things done. “These past few years, I’ve tried to learn who I am, and find out what I really want to do.” And what is that? “I want to do… what I’m doing,” he says. As he speaks, he stays half-kneeling, half-crouching on the edge of the bed, ready to pounce.
Comments